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The state is making an aggressive bid to lure disgruntled businesses across the border, with a campaign unabashedly asking on billboards and online: “Illinoyed by higher taxes?” They even took out an ad to pitch the message in the 2013-2014 Chicago Bears yearbook.

States have dueled over business investment for years, but the kind of rate-cutting and other hardball tactics pursued by Gov. Mike Pence is part of a groundswell of efforts from Republican governors.

In the boldest example, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been crisscrossing the country touting the benefits of his zero income tax state. The potential 2016 presidential candidate went directly to Missouri’s Chamber of Commerce earlier this year, and governors in Louisiana and Kansas cite Texas as a primary reason to cut taxes in their states.

Indiana joins North Carolina, Nebraska, Michigan and others in what critics call a risky fiscal gamble for states with limited resources. Indiana localities, meanwhile, worry the business boon will not spread across the entire state.

Anecdotally, the pitch seems to be working, at least in the short term.

One of the new migrants is Tec Air, a nearly half century old Illinois manufacturer enticed by Indiana’s low taxes, central location and a package of incentives that helped close the deal.

“Indiana has a balanced budget and they’re solvent,” said Tec Air president Bob McMurtry in an interview with POLITICO. “We are getting three times the spacial footprint and we’re going to be paying less than half of what we pay now in real estate taxes.”

Since January, Indiana has passed a major tax cut that will trim corporate taxes from 7.5 percent to 6.5 percent by the end of 2015 and cut individual taxes from 3.4 to 3.23 percent by 2017.

Pence, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, inherited the job creation drive when he took office in January of this year. But he is now pushing deeper tax cuts and an effort to scrap business property taxes, with the hope of sparking an Indiana boom.

At the same time, Pence announced $57 million in spending cuts this month to offset lower-than-expected tax collections.

Critics say the strategy has a spotty history of success.

The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analyzed economic growth data from states that cut taxes in 1990s and the 2000s and found that, on average, those states grew less than the other states.

“It isn’t clear that they did worse because of the income tax reduction, but they certainly didn’t do any better,” said Michael Leachman, the group’s director of state fiscal research. “That’s consistent with the academic literature on this topic which finds in general that income tax levels don’t matter for economic growth.”

It is always tricky to isolate the impact of tax policy and the evidence in Indiana may be equally tough to judge. The economy was already starting to grow in the two years that preceded the tax cuts. In 2012, 256 companies committed to create over 27,600 jobs and the state created about 19,080 jobs in 2011.

A 2012 Pew Charitable Trusts study found that most states do not properly evaluate whether they are getting a good deal for the tax breaks they dole out.

Still, the deep cuts are attractive for business in neighboring states like Illinois, where income tax rates are 9.5 percent for corporations and 5 percent for individuals.

When Smith, a former manufacturing executive, was appointed in January he was given one goal from Pence—adding 2,609,000 private sector jobs. He said the state has added 22,000 jobs since January, though he acknowledged he has a long way to go.